Asus has officially announced the latest member to its Seashell line of netbooks, the 11.6-inch Eee PC 1101HA. The netbook was spotted in the wild earlier this week at Computex, along with near enough full specifications.

The press release is pretty sparse on detail, only confirming it will have a HD (1366 x 768) resolution LED backlit display and battery life of 11 hours. It also confirms a 160GB HDD, wireless draft-N, Bluetooth, a 1.3MP webcam, digital array microphone and multi-touch touchpad. Hopefully some more detailed specifications, along with pricing and availability, will be announced shortly.

Laptop Mag managed to get hands-on with the 1101HA and found that it came with a spacious keyboard, a trackpad similar to that seen in the 1008HA, but only a small right shift key which is disappointing. The unit played with was running on a 1.33GHz Z520 Atom CPU.

This is the same processor found in the Acer Aspire One 751 and has been criticised for its poor performance, especially with HD video content. I would think that the 1.6GHz Z530 Atom CPU would be a must, otherwise what’s the point in having that high-res screen? There’s a video on the site if you went to check-out a hands on.

Asus is also planning to a model that will come with 3G called the Eee PC 1101HGO. To compensate for the additional power drain from 3G, it will be fitted with a slightly larger battery (that protrudes out) than the one found in the 1101HA. Other specifications will remain the same.

Comments

(Personal Computers) The ASUS A53-AS31-RD is a very good general puspore laptop. It works well with productivity applications, web browsing and basic photo editing. It multitasks well (playing music and working on Office applications). The area around the keyboard and touchpad and the top are each textured; that and the dark red color keep this machine from being a fingerprint magnet: good design!Ports include an SD media slot, a LAN connection, three USB ports and HDMI out. Battery life is average; around 3 hours out of the box, although you can probably coax more out of it with adjustments in the Windows 7 control panel or the included ASUS desktop power management gadget. Out of the box it was relatively free of unwanted bloatware or trial versions of programs (kudos to ASUS for that).This computer does not ship with recovery media; you’ll need four DVDs when you run its built-in utility to create your own recovery kit (do this first!).Overall, this is a solid laptop that should serve well for all but the most demanding computing needs. The color breaks it from the packs of black, silver and white machines out there! Watch for deep discounts to make this unit even more attractive.Note: this machine’s default hard drive configuration includes two logical partitions, with about 75% devoted to a “D” drive for data. I used Windows disk management tools to shrink that volume and restore all the free space to the “C” drive. This is just my preference, but it can help avoid issues with applications that struggle to remember “non-C-drive” locations for storing data files.